December 9, 2024 - 12:45pm
The Ministry of Defence is reportedly ramping up testing of battlefield electronic vehicles (EVs). Defence Secretary John Healey has hailed the venture as a means “to improve the […] environmental performance of military vehicles”. If Britain is to fight a war, the present Labour government seems intent that it will do so without releasing too much carbon into the atmosphere.
The pushback from military officers has been intense. Former commander of British forces in Afghanistan Colonel Richard Kemp called it “virtue-signalling”. Admiral Lord West said that the endeavour gave him a “horrible feeling”. Meanwhile, Colonel Tim Collins, who commanded the Royal Irish in Iraq, asked: “What is driving this? Is it battlefield necessity or fashion?” There is no doubt, evidently, that this is another example of boutique political and cultural issues overriding any desire for competence in British institutions.
But it goes deeper than that. The reality is that the Labour government is intent on handing over the limited resources left in the British military’s kitty to friendly contractors. Magtec, a defence firm that specialises in the electrification of vehicles, has scored £400,000 in contracts since July. While this is a drop in the bucket relative to the overall size of the military budget, it is yet another indication that the British Government long ago stopped focusing on fielding a serious military. Instead, it has reverted to ideological box-ticking.
When the Houthis started harassing ships in the Red Sea a year ago, Britain controversially refused to send an aircraft carrier to the region, instead favouring bombing campaigns run out of an RAF base in Cyprus. Reports at the time pointed to a staffing crisis which meant that the Royal Navy could only field a support vessel. A few weeks after Britain refused to commit its aircraft carrier, it turned out that the HMS Queen Elizabeth was unable to take part in Nato exercises due to problems with its propeller.
Nor are the problems limited to Britain’s aircraft carriers. In February of this year, the Royal Navy tried to test-launch a missile from its Trident submarine. It failed for the second time in a row and the missile crashed into the sea. The MoD insisted that the British nuclear deterrent “remains safe, secure and effective”, but it is not clear how it could evaluate this after two failed tests in a row. The reality is that the Trident nuclear deterrent has not been successfully tested in a decade.
This should be of particular concern after Keir Starmer’s long campaign to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia resulted in Moscow launching its new Oreshnik missile against a target in Dnipro. The missile arrived from its launch site in Astrakhan within minutes of being fired and very likely caught those operating Nato’s early-warning radar systems by surprise. If this had been a nuclear strike, would Trident have been able to launch all its munitions? No one can say for sure.
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